Forum Moderators: phranque
Since I'm from the United States, the 02/02/04 (MM/DD/YY) format has been ingrained in my mind since first starting elementary school (that was a long time ago).
A few years ago I was participating in a thread here at WebmasterWorld where the ISO 8601 Date and Time formats were being discussed. I realized then that I may have been confusing the heck out of a good portion of my visitors by using a date and time format that did not coincide with their countries date and time format.
From that point forward, I've forced myself to now use the ISO 8601 date and time formats. It took a little while to get used to writing the dates like 2004/02/02 or 2004-02-02. But think about it, would your global audience understand the date and time formats that you are utilizing on your web pages? Check out some of these references for more information...
References
For you FrontPage users out there, I've developed a custom webbot date and time stamp that adheres to the ISO 8601 specification...
<!--webbot bot="Timestamp" S-Type="EDITED" S-Format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%Z" -->The above code will display the date and time in this format...
2004-02-02T04:06:59-0800
You can easily modify the above webbot to remove the time zone if not required. Just shorten it to...
<!--webbot bot="Timestamp" S-Type="EDITED" S-Format="%Y-%m-%d" -->The long version of the ISO 8601 date format would look like this...
2004 February 02, Monday
<added> Here is the FrontPage webbot for the above long version date format.
<!--webbot bot="Timestamp" S-Type="EDITED" S-Format="%Y %B %d, %A" -->This particular format allows no room for confusion, none whatsoever. By now I'm sure everyone realizes that years should be expressed as YYYY (2004) and not YY (04). That is the most confusing part of date formats, the two digit year. This was also a big part of the Y2K bug.
The second biggest advantage of using the 2004-02-02 format has been for sorting.
What are you using and why? What alternatives have you come up with to appeal to your global audience?
[edited by: pageoneresults at 1:38 pm (utc) on Feb. 2, 2004]
For sorting purposes, I use the unix date format by itself because it also includes the time.
From my experience the best is always to use characters for months and numbers for years and days.
Take 02-03-2004
Americans will think the date is February 3 2004.
Europeans on the other hand will first think about 2nd of March 2004.
However Feb-03-2004 or 03-Feb-2004 is clear for both of them :)
The American system is the most bizarre, incrementing the middle, then the left, then the right!
The Euro system is a bit more logical, incrementing the first, then second, then third digit.
The ISO standard of year/month/day is the most sensible, but still causes confusion and conflict with the other two systems. It is not widely used and will cause more confusion than those above.
> The second biggest advantage of using the 2004-02-02 format has been for sorting.
The best thing about programming languages is that you can store the date in that nice (logical) format in your database, but present a neater version (swapping the characters about and changing months to text) to your audience. Conversion would be a couple of lines of regular expressions.
I don't know if anyone knows this, but there are 12 months in a year. Not 10, which would be nice and binary, but 12. And some of those months have 31 days, and others have 30! And you get this weird one with 28 or 29 sometimes. Who designed this bizarre system?
And that's just the calendar dates. The days of the week are even worse. So you get these goofy month lengths, but some most start on a different day than the previous month!
Obviously it wasn't a software designer who came up with this wacko system for the calendar.
So then you get into formats.
since I use mySql, everything has to come into the DB as yyyy-mm-dd, which is great, because if you take out the dashes you get a pretty useful integer yyyymmdd. With that integer I can do some nice date range queries.
For display on the websites I use mm/dd/yyyy because all my users are American. When the time comes for my first european customers I'll make it dd/yy/mmmm.
And when I require a date entered on the web form, I insist upon mm/dd/yyyy and provide a popup calendar so they click the date and it appears. Only in one instance do I provide three drop down boxes for M, D, Y.
I have to do all the coding behind the scenes to get the date into the proper formats and to then display in the proper formats.
But it's worth it not to confuse my audience. Remember, your users are stupid.
What Date Format do YOU use on YOUR website?
[webmasterworld.com]
International Pitfalls for American Webmasters [webmasterworld.com]
"But think about it, would your global audience understand the date and time formats that you are utilizing on your web pages?"
I am not sure any final resultions were reached back then, nor will they ever be for that matter. The challemge is the variety of cultures and standards, even though there is one supposed international standard, and the habits that are ingrained into people over the years by both happenstance and circumstance.
I still think better in Inches, whereas my older brother, being the engineering type, only thinks in Millimeters (Not Centimeters Please! Tsk! Tsk!)
Add in Languages, as referenced in those earlier threads, and the challenge broadens.
From a taxonomic point of view, ISO 8601 makes perfect sense, going from the larger to the smaller, and I am betting that it would not take people too much thought to realise the format being used and adapt their thinking. Incidently, I also use it for filenames which, as you say P1R, does make sorting much simpler.
Onya
Woz
Astronomers have been comfortable with the YYYY-MM-DD format for at least 200 years, as have most of Scandinavia, parts of Eastern Europe, and most of the far-East. Additionally, that format was also defined as an Internet standard in RFC 3339 and is the recommended format in most XML-based schemas. You would be quite surprised at just how many places do now use it.
I have seen it as the date stamp on news sites, on records at WHOIS loookup sites, and against results in search engines, on various blogs, and in many other places.
Pick a date, any date, format it as YYYY-MM-DD and use that as a Google search. You will get a lot of results.
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>> However Feb-03-2004 or 03-Feb-2004 is clear for both of them :) <<
In a long list of dates, try reformatting that as 2004-Feb-03 or as 2004-02-03 instead. Try that for a week, and see how much easier it is to read dates left to right.
When looking for new posts in a forum that uses a format like 11:22 PM Feb 2nd 2004 I have to check the day column, the hours column, and the am/pm marker. Since they are not in adjacent colums, or even in some sort of ascending or descending order it really is not simple to do so (additionally have that site only use, say, the "EST" time zone, when I only know what the time is in my own local zone and what that time is expressed in UTC, and I end up with a headache).
With the list in the alternative YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM order and using the 24-hour clock format it is much easier to scan left to right to the required granularity, checking that the data is after some marker point (like the date and time you have in your head as being the last time you visited). If the site works entirely in UTC then that is an added bonus too.
